Related papers: Towards Understanding and Demystifying Bitcoin Mix…
Cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin, in particular, are prone to wild swings resulting in frequent jumps in prices, making them historically popular for traders to speculate. A better understanding of these fluctuations can greatly benefit crypto…
The Bitcoin Lightning Network, launched in 2018, serves as a layer 2 scaling solution for Bitcoin. The Lightning Network allows users to establish channels between each other and subsequently exchange off-chain payments. Together, these…
Bitcoin has witnessed a prevailing transition that employing transaction fees paid by users rather than subsidy assigned by the system as the main incentive for mining.
Cryptocurrencies that are based on Proof-of-Work (PoW) often rely on special purpose hardware to perform so-called mining operations that secure the system, with miners receiving freshly minted tokens as a reward for their work. A notable…
Money laundering is a major global problem, enabling criminal organisations to hide their ill-gotten gains and to finance further operations. Prevention of money laundering is seen as a high priority by many governments, however detection…
Monero is a privacy-centric cryptocurrency that allows users to obscure their transactions by including chaff coins, called "mixins," along with the actual coins they spend. In this paper, we empirically evaluate two weaknesses in Monero's…
Secret sharing schemes based on the idea of hidden multipliers in encryption are proposed. As a platform, one can use both multiplicative groups of finite fields and groups of invertible elements of commutative rings, in particular,…
Bitcoins and Blockchain technologies are attracting the attention of different scientific communities. In addition, their widespread industrial applications and the continuous introduction of cryptocurrencies are also stimulating the…
Proof-of-work allows Bitcoin to boast security amidst arbitrary fluctuations in participation of miners throughout time, so long as, at any point in time, a majority of hash power is honest. In recent years, however, the pendulum has…
Cryptocurrencies have gained tremendous popularity over the past few years. The purpose of this study is to try to understand the factors that are driving cryptocurrency-related trading activities. Focusing on the well-established…
Different versions of peer-to-peer electronic cash exist as data represented by separate blockchains. Payments between such systems cannot be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Bitcoin…
We introduce systematic tests exploiting robust statistical and behavioral patterns in trading to detect fake transactions on 29 cryptocurrency exchanges. Regulated exchanges feature patterns consistently observed in financial markets and…
The Bitcoin P2P network is at the core of all communications between clients. The reachable part of this network has been explored and analyzed by numerous studies. Unreachable nodes, however, are, in most part, overlooked. Nonetheless,…
As one of the most important and famous applications of blockchain technology, cryptocurrency has attracted extensive attention recently. Empowered by blockchain technology, all the transaction records of cryptocurrencies are irreversible…
This study investigates the mechanisms of Surveillance Capitalism, focusing on personal data transfer during web navigation and searching. Analyzing network traffic reveals how various entities track and harvest digital footprints. The…
Blockchain analysis is essential for understanding how cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are used in practice, and address clustering is a cornerstone of blockchain analysis. However, current techniques rely on heuristics that have not been…
Cryptocurrencies are a type of digital money meant to provide security and anonymity while using cryptography techniques. Although cryptocurrencies represent a breakthrough and provide some important benefits, their usage poses some risks…
Address clustering tries to construct the one-to-many mapping from entities to addresses in the Bitcoin system. Simple heuristics based on the micro-structure of transactions have proved very effective in practice. In this paper we describe…
For preserving privacy, blockchains can be equipped with dedicated mechanisms to anonymize participants. However, these mechanism often take only the abstraction layer of blockchains into account whereas observations of the underlying…
Among the now numerous alternative cryptocurrencies derived from Bitcoin, Zcash is often touted as the one with the strongest anonymity guarantees, due to its basis in well-regarded cryptographic research. In this paper, we examine the…